The Brimming Cup

She laid her hands on the keys; and across those little smarting,

trivial personalities there struck the clear, assured dignity and worth

of her old friend . . . was there ever such a friend as that rough old

German who had died so long before she was born? No one could say the

human race was ignoble or had never deserved to live, who knew his

voice. In a moment she was herself again.

Those well-remembered opening chords, they were by this time not merely

musical sounds. They had become something within her, of her own being,

rich with a thousand clustered nameless associations, something that

thrilled and sang and lived a full harmonious life of its own. That

first pearling down-dropping arabesque of treble notes, not only her

fingers played those, but every fiber in her, answering like the

vibrating wood of a violin, its very cells rearranged in the pattern

which the notes had so many times called into existence . . . by the time

she had finished she had almost forgotten that she had listeners.

And when, sitting for a moment, coming back slowly from Beethoven's

existence to her own, she heard no sound or stir from the porch, she

had only a quiet smile of tolerant amusement. Apparently she had not

guessed right as to their tastes. Or perhaps she had played them to

sleep.

As for herself, she was hungry for more; she reached out her hand

towards that world of high, purified beauty which miraculously was

always there, with open doors of gold and ivory. . . .

What now? What did she know by heart? The Largo in the Chopin Sonata.

That would do to come after Beethoven.

The first plunge into this did not so intimately startle and stir her as

the Beethoven movement had done. It was always like that, she thought as

she played, the sound of the first note, the first chord struck when one

had not played for a day or so; it was having one's closed eyes unsealed

to the daylight anew, an incredulous rapture. But after that, though you

didn't go on quaking and bowing your head, though you were no longer

surprised to find music still there, better than you could possibly

remember it, though you took it for granted, how deeply and solidly and

steadfastly you lived in it and on it! It made you like the child in the

Wordsworth sonnet, "A beauteous evening, calm and free"; it took you in

to worship quite simply and naturally at the Temple's inner shrine; and

you adored none the less although you were not "breathless with

adoration," like the nun; because it was a whole world given to you, not

a mere pang of joy; because you could live and move and be blessedly and

securely at home in it.